Booting Ram Drives

[serpretetsky]

i've been trying to find some info on ram drives, and i'm failing.

1) I've heard that people have actually been able to use the remaining parts of their 4gigs to make ram drives (on 32bit systems...). What about above 4 gigs (if have a 5 gigs of memory on xp32, can xp use 3 gigs, and my ram drive use 2gigs?)

2) I wanted to try a setup where my computer actually boots to a ram drive. Something like network boot but instead get the image or entire partition from my hard drive, dvd, removable media, etc. I've found some articles online for doing it with 32bit systems (using some 2003 sp1 files), i cant find anything about 64bit systems. Anyone have any luck doing this (32 or 64)?

 

[Joe Average]

No current "real" RAMdisk technology will allow you to boot off it. While the iRAM from Gigabyte could be called a "RAMdisk" since it's basically using real actual RAM sticks for storage, the fact that it's crippled so drastically by being strapped to the PCI/SATA bus effectively renders it pretty damned slow compared to what it could do, so I don't even refer to such hardware as a RAMdisk.

Here's the really funny thing. It's literally been 25 years now since I acquired an Amiga 500 (ok, 24.5, but who cares). One thing the Amigas could do was set aside a portion of the (then) miserable little 2MB of RAM, say about 512KB of it, and use that as a RAMdisk - and that RAMdisk was bootable - the contents would survive a warm boot (the PC equivalent is Control+Alt+Delete when in DOS mode - and you could actually change the system pointers so it would reboot from the contents of it.

I set mine up to do that and it was a watershed moment for me, no longer needing to use the damned slow ass floppy Kickstart crap or loading Workbench from them either.

Funny how 25 years or so has gone by and nothing has ever really come close. Amigas... even now, they are still the best personal computers ever made in my opinion. Sure the machines of today are fast, but... Amigas had hardware multitasking out of the box and even today's high powered monster PCs have trouble with that and are still basically just emulating the Amiga's capabilities...

I miss those times, they were fun...

As for using the "excess" RAM above the 32 bit 3.25GB "cap" the software in question is RamDisk Plus by SuperSpeed.com, using a proprietary method they've discovered to allow the use of such RAM for RAMdisk purposes. Great stuff...

 

[serpretetsky]

yeah, i was just thinking about how awesome it would be with current motherboards that max at 24GBs if it would be possible to setup a ramdrive straight through the bios and even tell the system to automatically load a specific image after post and boot. 6GBs of memory, and an 18GB ramdrive.

interesting post:
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10445